The electric telegraph was patented by Morse in 1837, but the first telegram was not sent till 1844, along a wire stretched from Washington to Baltimore. It is said that the first official message was "What hath God wrought!" This message shows a realization of a fact which some people fail to realize: the people who say, "God made the country, but man made the city." The message showed a realization that God inspires the thoughts of men, as truly as He provides them with things to eat. It is inconceivable that it was intended to call attention to the fact that God wrought the wire along which the message ran, or the wooden poles that carried the wire, or the material zinc and copper of the battery. The only new thing evidenced in the telegraph so far as anyone could know, was the invention itself. God had wrought that through the agency of Morse. It is a known fact that no human mind, no matter how fine it may be, or how brilliant and correct its imagination, can have any images or ideas that are not based in some way on the evidence of the senses. We can imagine things, and even create things, that have never existed before; but those things must be composed of parts whose existence we know of through the evidence of our senses. So Morse, although he invented a thing that was wholly new, although he created something--did not create any of the parts that composed it. He used such well-known things as wire, iron, zinc and copper. Even in the creation of man, the Almighty himself used common materials: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." (Genesis, Chapter II.) If the Lord God breathed the breath of life into Adam, He inspired him according to the original meaning of the word inspire. If He inspired Morse with the conception of the electric telegraph, He inspired him according to the modern meaning of the word, which is not very different from the original meaning, and which is not at all different from the meaning according to which He is said to have inspired the prophets of old.